Sylvia Beach

Sylvia Beach published Ulysses when no one else would, ran the bookshop that was the centre of literary Paris between the wars, and closed it rather than sell a book to a German officer. She was a Presbyterian minister's daughter from Baltimore who opened Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank in 1919 as an English-language bookshop and lending library, financed by her mother's savings. It became a post office, a bank, a reading room and a club for Hemingway, Pound, Gertrude Stein, Fitzgerald and Sherwood Anderson. Ulysses had been prosecuted for obscenity in New York in 1921 after serialisation, and no commercial publisher in Britain or America would touch it; Beach, with no publishing experience, offered to bring it out, and did so on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday, in an edition of a thousand printed at Dijon by a printer who spoke no English. She handled the smuggling of copies into the United States, the endless corrections Joyce added to the proofs, and a great deal of his money. He then signed a contract with Random House in 1934 without her and without compensation once the book was legal, which ended the friendship on her side; she never claimed a right to it. In 1941 a German officer demanded her last copy of Finnegans Wake, she refused, and she closed the shop within hours and hid the stock upstairs. She was interned for six months. The shop never reopened; the present Shakespeare and Company took the name in 1964 with her permission. Her partner Adrienne Monnier ran the French-language bookshop across the street and published the first French translation of Ulysses. Beach wrote a memoir in 1959. She is buried in Princeton.

• Lived: 1887 CE – 1962 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: other